My guru is this moment. My lineage is this moment. My spiritual path is this moment. And my home is this moment.

The Threshold of Mystery

Jeff, August 19, 2012

“Who are you?”

Please, do not regurgitate second-hand answers to this question. Do not not repeat lifeless, memorised phrases about the absence of the self, the utter perfection of pure, content-less awareness, the unreality of the ‘I’ or the giddy, unstable high of “being no-one”.

Answer fully, not with regurgitated words but with your entire being. Do not try to teach, and do not fear giving the wrong answer. Let a living answer seep from every pore, or do not answer at all.

This question cannot go half-answered, for life cannot go half-lived.

Tell me: What moves you to tears? Whose tears do you wipe away? Who do you embrace as they shiver and shake and shit themselves into oblivion? What devastates you? Who do you hold in the darkness, and who holds you there? How deeply can you meet the one in front of you, without pulling away out of fear? How deeply have you touched this unspeakable compassion that moves worlds?

Tell me how deeply your heart has broken, how your twin childhood terrors of abandonment and intimacy have melted into rivers of heartbreaking grief and grace and love beyond understanding, how all your concepts of what it means to be ‘spiritual’ or ‘awakened’ or even ‘alive’ have crumbled to ashes and dust, leaving only this mysterious life in all its raw, undivided, unfiltered, naked, brilliance.

Tell me who you are, friend, but do not give me any mental conclusions or conceptualisations so far removed from your actual lived experience.

No teachers, no books, no tall tales of your own awakening or spiritual transformation will help you here, on the threshold of this great Mystery.